Smoking in and around high schools has become ‘cool, once again. Over the past year, vaping has overtaken cigarette smoking as the surreptitious habit of choice among teens as well as undergraduate university students. While smoking e-cigarettes is officially outlawed on school property, that has not stopped a dramatic rise in the popularity of vaping among high schoolers. In the case of Ontario, a 2017 provincial survey revealed that more students in Grades 7 to 12 self-reported vaping (18 per cent) than smoking tobacco cigarettes (12 per cent).

The latest vape innovation, the Juul, now dominates the United States teen market and is beginning to spread into Canada. Inhaling multi-flavoured vapors with nicotine is now much harder for school administrators and teachers to detect. The small, sleek device, or juul, which can be easily mistaken for a portable USB drive has cornered the market for e-cigarettes and vaping products, particularly in affluent school districts where students can afford the latest gadgets and stimulants. Concealing bulging vaporizers was tough, but these low-profile, sleek designs allow students to easily conceal their habit and to escape detection not only in in the usual spots (bathrooms, back hallways, and under stairwells), but even in classrooms.

Like most teen crazes, vaping and ‘julling’ caught on far faster than school officials realized and became well established before authorities saw the scale of the problem. School principals are scrambling to contain the practice and trying to stamp it out. “I think it’s everywhere, and my school is no different, ” Connecticut principal Francis Thompsonrecently told Education Week. Then he added, “I think it’s the next health epidemic..”

Vaping with the stealth devices, while less prevalent, is reportedly rising in and around Canadian high schools. “Everybody’s doing it, ” a Grade 9 student in Windsor-Essex County told Windsor CBC News in early April 2018. Teens in Ottawa high schools featured in a May 2018 Canadian Press news story confirmed that it was now “cool” to smoke again, albeit with vaporizers and in well-known hiding spots. In Sydney, Cape Breton, students at Sydney Academy were well-aware of students vaping in class undetected, and fellow students suspended for smoking who were actually vaping on school grounds.

The new federal legislation, the Tobacco and Vaping Products Act, passed in May 2015, may help to clarify the legal position of school principals trying to cope with the latest craze. Bill S-5 (2018) may improve the quality and regulation of vaping products and it does restrict use to adults. Federal regulations, expected within six months, will reduce the number of flavours used in e-cigarettes, banning those designed to mimic ‘confectionary,’ cannabis, or energy drinks, and designed to hook young people on these devices.

Defenders of e-cigarettes continue to maintain that they are a safer alternative to tar-producing tobacco cigarettes. Tobacco experts at Public Health England tend to support such claims, as confirmed in a February 2018 UK government report. Whether vaping is effective in promoting smoking cessation is far from clear in studies to date.

School policies banning smoking have been updated to include vaping, but the new stealth devices are making it harder than ever to enforce, especially when the juul looks so much like a USB stick and can be easily concealed by student users. The latest fear expressed by school principals and teachers is the prospect of vaporizers being used to deliver cannabis, circumventing school detection and regulations. When cannabis is legalized across Canada, October 17, 2018, we shall see whether it further complicates the job of policing and eliminating vaping on school grounds.

Why is vaping replacing tobacco smoking as the nicotine product of choice in and around schools? Will the American juul craze become more widely accepted and entrenched among teens here in Canada? Should we be focusing so much on stamping out vaping or on convincing students to stop smoking, whatever the substance? Will the legalization of marijuana only compound this problem for teachers and school administrators?

Teachers are talking and raising alarm bells about the impact of marijuana legalization on students and our high schools – and the real daily challenges that lie ahead. This is a head’s up – we should all be listening to those on the front lines of education.

Seven American states and the District of Columbia have followed the early adopter, Colorado, in legalizing the recreational use of cannabis and the movement is spreading to other states. Four of the seven states legalized its use in November 2016, and the Canadian government has established its implementation date later this year.

Looking across Canada, province after province has been announcing its implementation policy, focusing almost exclusively on the control and regulation of the previously illegal substance, provoking fierce debates over who will reap most of the the exise tax windfall and whether cannabis will be sold in government stores or delegated to heavily regulated private vendors. All of the provincial policy pronouncements claim that the policy will be designed to protect “public health and safety” and safeguard “children and youth” from the “harmful effects.”

Marijuana legalization policy across Canada is a top-down federal initiative driven largely by changing public attitudes and conditioned by the current realities of widespread use of marijuana, purchased though illicit means. Setting the age of restriction, guided by the proposed federal policy framework, has turned out to be an exercise in reaching a “compromise” rather than heeding the advice of leading medical experts and the Canadian Medical Association (CMA). The CMA proposed age 25 and then accepted age 21 as more “realistic.” It’s going to be 18 year-of-age in Alberta and Quebec, and 19 years-of-age in most other provinces. Getting it “out of high schools” was a critical factor in bumping it up to age 19 in most provinces.

Every Canadian province is complying with the federal legislation, but — in our federal system – it’s “customized” for each jurisdiction. The Canadian Western provinces, Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan have opted for regulating private retail stores, while Ontario and the Maritime provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and P.E.I.), are expanding their liquor control commissions to accommodate retail sales of cannabis.

My home province, Nova Scotia, tends to find the “middle ground” in public policy and has done so once again. That’s why Nova Scotia provides perhaps the best point of entry into the Canadian situation.

On top of chronic absenteeism, ‘accept all excuses’ policies, and bureaucratic paperwork, most of Nova Scotia’s high school teachers will soon, as of September 2018, be battling a spike in marijuana use and greater peer pressure to smoke pot on the mistaken assumption that it is “harmless” at any age.

The Nova Scotia government, guided by the steady hand of Minister Mark Furey, has done a reasonably good job in responding, under tight timelines, to the immediate challenge of establishing a strict control and distribution regime, albeit dependent upon the traditional public sector apparatus and the NSLC stores.

The essential problem is that control and regulation is only half of the challenge – and it sends out implicit signals that, after the failure of the ‘war on drugs,’ softened public attitudes will now dictate policy, irrespective of the health harms inflicted on children and youth.

One in five young people between 15 and 24 years of age, according to a recent national study, report daily or almost daily use of cannabis. They also see marijuana as “much safer than alcohol and tobacco” and “not as dangerous as drunk driving.” Few either know about or seem concerned over the clear linkage between heavy use and early onset psychosis.

Three major education policy concerns are not being addressed, all of which are identified in the current research on the harmful effects of marijuana on children and youth up until age 25. With the legalization of marijuana, evidence-based policy needs to recognize that:

Heavy marijuana use can, and does, damage age 13 to 18 brain development: A 2016 Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse study confirmed the direct link to loss of concentration and memory, jumbled thinking, and paranoid psychosis.

Marijuana users perform more poorly in quantitative subjects requiring precision, like mathematics and senior science: Clear evidence was presented in 2017 by Dutch researchers Olivier Marie and Ulf Zolitz that ‘liberalizing’ rules also led to decreased academic success among Maastricht University students, and particularly for struggling students.

Legalization of marijuana increases the number of teen users: Early initiators increase their use significantly and overall reported use rises by about 10 per cent to one out of three teens, including previously low-risk students (New York University 2014, Oregon Research Institute 2017).

Medical researchers and practitioners have warned us that legalization carries great dangers, particularly for vulnerable and at-risk youth between 15 and 24 years of age.

One of the leaders in the medical field, Dr. Phil Tiboo, initiator of Nova Scotia’s Weed Myths campaign targeting teens has seen the evidence, first hand, of what heavy use can do at the Halifax QE II Infirmary Early Psychosis clinic. We will pay a price for not heeding the warnings of Dr. Tiboo about popular and rather blasé notions that marijuana is “harmless” to teens and “recreational use” is somehow “fun” and “healthy.”

One glaring example of the mixed messages was the November 2017 CBC Nova Scotia televised debate, entitled “Joint Venture,” a media production that actually made matters worse. It was all framed as a “cool” public policy about to propel us into the “green frontier. Watching and listening to the four panelists must have been terribly upsetting for doctors and high school teachers. Ill-informed comments went unchallenged, and no one spoke for educators who have daily encounters with students “high” on drugs.

High school principals and staff are facing a real test with the legalization of marijuana. The old line of defense that using marijuana is illegal will have disappeared. Recreational marijuana will be more socially acceptable. The cannabis industry will be openly marketing its products. High school students who drive to school will likely get caught under new laws prohibiting motor vehicle use while impaired by drugs or alcohol. Fewer students will be abstainers when it is perfectly legal to smoke pot when you reach university, college, or the workplace.

We have utterly failed, so far, in getting through to the current generation of teens, so a much more robust approach is in order. “Be firm at the beginning” is the most common sage advice given to beginning teachers. Clamping down on teen marijuana use during and after school hours will require clarity and firm resolve in the year ahead – and the support of engaged and responsible parents.

Legalization of recreational marijuana is bound to complicate matters for Canadian high schools everywhere. Busting the “Weed Myths” should not be left to doctors and health practitioners. When it comes to meeting this serious challenge, let’s get behind those on the front lines.

What’s really driving the move to legalize the recreational use of marijuana? Where does that leave education authorities, school principals and high school teachers? What works, if anything, in deterring teens in the absence of a law prohibiting open public use? Is it possible that teaching in high schools is about to get far more challenging?